About

I got caught shooting a whole film with no film roll in the camera, by the actors wondering why I had to secretly get the film roll out of the camera in the toilets without letting them in. When they forced me to reveal the film, I had nothing to show them because I had been pretending to film them for the entire afternoon; they were really pissed because of all the action and intense dialog scenes we had been doing, while apparently I could have been holding a dog instead of the camera in my hand the whole time, and the result would have been identical down to the single frame. But that’s how desperate I was to have a working camera when I was 8 years old.

The next obvious solution was to ask my bible study teacher, the first person I met with a real camcorder, to be director of photography on my next movie : “Death in the Inferno”. The movie ends with a child in flames (my brother) who screams for his mother as he plunges into the blazing abyss, and luckily she accepted to film that scene too provided that I re-wrote the puppet’s dialog to avoid profanity as much as possible.

Now we really had something going, and I guess my parents too spotted the visceral interest for creating reactions growing in me; after pretending to do my homework for any amount of time my father decided was the appropriate amount of time one should spend on homework, I was granted access to the family’s new camcorder; I experimented with video throughout my high school years with the intensity of a dog you’re about to signal that we are indeed going for a walk. Like that impossible love story where the education system is the conservative grand-father who won’t let you have sex with his innocent daughter in his house until you’re married, school became the only obstacle between me and the camera.